How to Build a Snowboard on Vancouver Island – Part Deux

Welcome back guys and girls, hopefully you enjoyed the first instalment of building a snowboard on Vancouver Island and your checking in again to see how were getting on here at Section 8 HQ! The snow is starting to fall on Mt Washington already and I dont know about you but I’m thinking about getting pow turns and getting invited into the white room again!!

Now is when we start work on the wood veneer top sheet. Most of the modern day boards are printed here on plastic and added and then its pressed and done. On this board I decided on a graphic I have had in mind for a while, what we did is cut out the design using different wood veneers, which are super thin, 1mm thick, choice cuts of wood grain. On this board we used 4 different types of veneer, Maple, Black Walnut, Mahogany and Teak.

This is the most pain staking part of this board design. We have to cut out each individual piece of wood to perfectly puzzle together in one giant very fragile puzzle with 20 something pieces. I joked around with Evan saying over a beer and dinner that it shouldn’t take me longer than 2 hours to do this… but after 8 solid hours I was close but not done and very tired of cutting!

Once all the cutting is done we have to turn all the pieces over and stick them together with veneer tape. This is the kind of tape that the best way I can describe it is a giant roll of stamps, you have to wet the sticky side and glue every seam so the jigsaw piece becomes one board sized diagram! I finally finished this section and it was time to go. Leave the fragile puzzle to one side and lets do the other sections!

Now we have to hand bend the edges for our snowboard. The big manufacturers have a machine to do this but then this snowboard wouldn’t be handmade on Vancouver Island… so we start bending. I really want to say that I did this section but it really is the most frustrating thing to do and if you get it wrong you can ruin all previous hard work, so I left Evan to do this part and it takes a fair while so I left him to it… a couple hours later and its done, thanks buddy!

This process involves slowly bending a big piece of metal until it is completely flush with the shape of the board. Once you have the outline in place what we do is superglue the edge to the side of the board so it is essentially ‘temporarily’ stuck to the board.

If you ever look closely to any board the nose and tail parts of the edge are never one piece because it would be so hard to bend into one shape. The reason it is temporary is that when we come to sandwich all the layers together the epoxy is what actually glues the edge firmly in pace, not the superglue!

Now with everything else done we cut out our base. It comes in a giant roll and we use a template. This board it is a 163 and cut out precisely the shape we want. On this board it is a directional shape and as such the tail is stubby in comparison to the nose which is wider to give it more float in powder which is where this board is designed to be!!

And now comes the most exiting, daunting, scary whatever you want to call it! The base is cut and the edges are glued on and here we go.

So there one more section to go and you guys are going to have to wait a tiny bit more for the final results!! We have all the layers done and ready to get pressed and actually made to resemble what would be considered a snowboard rather than layers of wood and plastic which is what a snowboard will eventually be!

Check in soon for the final results and what happens in the press!

The Joke for this week is… I know you’ve been waiting for this one… it’s number related again!!

What did ‘zero’ say to ‘eight’?!

Nice belt…

You can thank my sister for this one, when she asked a 6 year old to say a joke in a snowboarding lesson this is what the 6 year old said!! Pretty sharp I think for a six year old!